Brief Communications Available to Purchase

The Lending Division of the British Library continues to assemble at Boston Spa as comprehensive a collection as possible of the world's worthwhile serial literature in all languages and subject fields. Its current holdings are listed in its annual directory Current Serials Received. For the last few years there has been a remarkably uniform net increase of 4% in the number of titles received, and in August 1978 the total exceeded 50,000 for the first time. The graph (Figure 1) shows how the collection of current serials has grown over the years. The relatively steep parts of the curve around 1967 and 1972 are the result of a broadening of the library's scope to include firstly social science and secondly humanities. 37% of the titles come from just two countries — the USA (20.3%) and GB (16.8%). Only two other countries, Germany (8.3%) and the USSR (6.4%), are responsible for more than 5%. The complete breakdown is shown in the following table.